Aleksandr Medvedkin (1900-1989)

Medvedkin spent his life and career dedicated to the romantic Bolshevik faith he clung to from his youth—a loyal servant of the Revolution—despite the fact that he faced decades of harassment and obstruction by censors and critics.

Aleksandr Medvedkin was born in Penza in 1900. He joined the Red Army in 1919, serving as a propaganda specialist in the Red Calvary. In 1920, he became a lifelong member of the Communist Party.

Medvedkin believed satire to be the most effective tool for correcting any failings in Soviet society. He developed his unique cinematic style blending avant-garde technique, political satire, and Stalinist propaganda drawing inspiration from Russian folklore and the American silent comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, to name just a few.

In 1932, Medvedkin organized the unique Cine-Train project, a studio on wheels that toured the country for 294 days filming the achievements of builders, factory workers, and railway workers, and also exposing mismanagement and incompetence. Most of the work produced by the Cine-Train has since been lost.

Medvedkin’s most important and endurable work came at the second half of the 1930s. His greatest film, Happiness (1935), is a brilliant, Chaplinesque parable of a farm peasant in debt, who wishes to commit suicide until he discovers true happiness through a faith in his future in a kolkhoz.

Medvedkin followed Happiness with two more films: The Miracle Worker (1936) and New Moscow (1938). The latter proved to be a complete disaster, when it was suddenly and inexplicably banned just two months after it was approved for distribution.

Although Medvedkin continued to make films throughout his lifetime, after the failure of New Moscow, he spent a half-decade in a kind of “cinema purgatory,” relegated to making newsreels during World War II and propaganda documentaries in the years that followed.